THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF EMBODIED COGNITION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Julian Kiverstein

Institute of Logic, Language and Computation

University of Amsterdam

Forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness

Special Issue on Sensorimotor Theory of Consciousness (Ed’s David Silverman &

Kevin O’Regan)

ABSTRACT

Classical cognitive scientists have operated with a strict separation of cognition from
consciousness. At the same time they have attempted to explain consciousness using the
same concepts of computation and representation as they employ to explain unconscious
cognition. This has led some philosophers to argue that an unbridgeable gap separates sub-
personal cognition from first-personal conscious experience. I shall argue that the
appearance of such a gap is due to an assumption that classical cognitive science inherits
from behaviourism that cognitive processes function independently from consciousness. My
aim in this paper will be to argue against this assumption. I will develop an embodied
theory of cognitive processes as constituted by temporally extended, skilled and practical
engagements with the world. Such a conception of cognitive processes challenges any
separation of conscious from non-conscious cognitive processes. It does so by showing how
both conscious and non-conscious cognitive processes mutually constrain each other as
dynamical processes evolving over different spatial and temporal scales. In virtue of the
mutual constraints that hold between conscious and non-conscious cognitive processes, I
argue against the view that cognition and consciousness can be separated. I finish up by
showing how this move opens the door to a deflation of the hard problem.

1
INTRODUCTION

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how subjective,

phenomenologically rich, conscious experiences can exist in a world that ultimately contains
only what is described in the physical sciences. If the fundamental physical constituents of
reality are non-experiential, how does the world of objects that look, sound, taste, smell and
feel a certain way, come into being?

In what follows I will be concerned with philosophers that have looked to the cognitive
sciences for a response to the hard problem. Ned Block distinguishes between functionalist
and physicalist versions of the latter strategy (Block 2003). Functionalists argue for a deflation
of the hard problem. They reject Chalmers (1996) distinction between “easy” and “hard”
problems. 1 Functionalists take phenomenal consciousness (a property of states there is
something it is like to be in) to be exhausted by its representational and functional
properties. They predict that an explanation of phenomenal consciousness will be found
using the computational explanatory tools of cognitive science. Physicalists by contrast
inflate consciousness, arguing that phenomenal consciousness cannot be reduced to function
and representation. 2 Physicalists argue that phenomenal consciousness will ultimately be
explained by finding the biochemical, cellular and molecular realisers of conscious
experiences. They predict that the explanation of phenomenal consciousness will come from
the brain sciences.

How have these two strategies faired? Functionalists have made various proposals about
under what conditions the outputs of this unconscious computational processing make their
way up from the depths of the unconscious into consciousness. All of these accounts share a
view of cognitive processes as ultimately depending on computational processing whose
workings are independent of consciousness. On the one hand this is a positive feature of the
approach. It opens the door to a non-circular explanation of consciousness in terms of
unconscious mechanistic processes. On the other hand, the attempt to explain consciousness
by reference to cognitive processes so-conceived seems to leave us more or less where we
started when it comes to successfully deflating the hard problem.3 We are left with a gap

1 The easy problems of consciousness include how to explains the abilities to discriminate, recognise
and react to environmental stimuli; the reportability of mental states; focus of attention; deliberate
control of behaviour and so on. Chalmers distinguished easy from hard problems by arguing that
while crucial details are missing, cognitive scientists have a rough idea how to handle the easy
problems. By contrast, Chalmers argued that cognitive science lacks even the beginnings of a
comparable story with respect to the hard problem (Chalmers 1996).
2 “Physicalism” is being used here in a non-standard way as a label for an approach to dealing with

the hard problem of consciousness. It does not refer to the broader metaphysical position according to
which everything that exists supervenes on the physical.
3 Practitioners and advocates of the deflationary strategy would no doubt dispute my negative

evaluation of the field. For a sampling of prominent examples, see Dennett 1991; Tye 1995; Dretske
1995; Lycan 1996; Carruthers 2000; Papineau 2002; Prinz 2012.

2
separating sub-personal, and unconscious computational processing from the first-person
experience of conscious persons. It is precisely this gap which is exploited in such infamous
anti-functionalist thought experiments as the Chinese nation and zombie thought
experiments (Block 1978; Chalmers 1996). We are invited to imagine complex systems like
the Chinese nation causally organised so as to share functional properties with us, but that
despite this functional similarity are entirely lacking in consciousness. Such thought
experiments draw their argumentative force by inviting us to imagine creatures and systems
whose cognitive processes function independently from consciousness. With such a view of
cognition in place, it is no wonder that we find it so easy to imagine creatures that share
cognitive processes with us but that lack consciousness.

Nor has physicalism succeeded in seeing-off the hard problem.4 For any given system of
neural correlates that is a candidate for explaining phenomenal consciousness, we can
always raise the question why it is that the activation of the brain systems in questions
results in subjects having a particular type of experience or any experience at all. Why
couldn’t the very same brain systems be activated in the complete and total absence of
experience? To avoid this likely rejoinder, it seems physicalists are going to need to have
recourse to some type of deflationary strategy. At least I will suppose this is the case in what
follows, and henceforth assume that the hard problem will need to be deflated if an answer
from the cognitive sciences is to be forthcoming.

In this paper I will explore the suggestion that it is the computational explanatory
framework of classical cognitive science that has so far stood in the way of a successful
deflationary strategy. Classical cognitive science (which I will henceforth label
“cognitivism”) operates with a conception of cognition that is a hangover from the
behaviourist tradition out of which classical cognitive science was born. 5 Cognitivists like
behaviourists deny that consciousness has a role to play in the explanation of behaviour.
They say that what people do is of interest insofar as it is a manifestation of underlying

4 Block 2011 and Lamme 2010 both defend what I’m calling a physicalist response. They argue that
phenomenal consciousness “overflows” cognitive access, and subjects can have phenomenally
conscious experiences that they cannot report on. However, both are left with hard questions about
how to decide which patterns of neural activation correlate with consciousness, questions that in my
view they have not satisfactorily answered. Without some type of report from subjects, which would
require cognitive access, it is hard to see how this problem can be solved. See Cohen & Dennett 2011
on “the perfect experiment”. Fahrenfort & Lamme 2012 attempt a response; they argue that cognitive
access fails to explain “how the contents of experience” are generated. However, their response seems
to assume that there can be experience in the absence of cognitive access, which is what is in question.
5 It would of course be a mistake to over-emphasise the similarities between cognitivism and
behaviourism. Cognitivists depart from behaviourism in rejecting the latter’s commitment to an
associationist architecture in favour of a view of cognitive processes as fundamentally
representational and rule-based (Fodor 1968). Ramsey 2007 also emphasises the differences between
cognitive and behaviourism. Interestingly, he sees the recent shift in cognitive science to developing
biologically plausible models of cognition as representing an abandonment of cognitivism, and return
to behaviourism.

3
cognitive processes which are conceived of as fundamentally unconscious in their workings.
Even higher-cognitive functions such as goal-pursuit, judgement and interpersonal
behaviour are taken by cognitivists to occur without guidance from consciousness (Bargh &
Ferguson 2000). Insofar as cognitive processes are taken to be computational in their
workings they are taken to unfold independently of consciousness.

Intuitively it strikes us that computation, no matter how sophisticated, is just what machines
do and as such cannot form the basis for consciousness and subjectivity. 6 Consider Ava, the
embodied AI in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (Garland 2015). She looks the part and behaves
in all the right kind of ways. Yet Garland invites us to think that in the end it might all just
be a clever and convincing show. Ava is undoubtedly a very smart machine capable of
impressive feats of social manipulation, but is she also a conscious subject? We are not sure.
If cognition is just computation, we intuitively think that consciousness must be based on
something else because computation in no way involves consciousness. 7 Whether we should
trust such intuitions is of course the right question for functionalists to press in response to
this type of objection (see Dennett 2001). I think we would be right to trust our intuitions in

6 The jury is actually out in the experimental philosophy literature concerning people’s willingness to
ascribe phenomenal experience to machines. Some studies have shown that people do distinguish
experiential states from intentional states more generally in roughly the same way as philosophers
(see e.g. Robbins & Jack 2006; Knobe & Prinz 2008). These studies would seem to support the
assertion I am making here that people would intuitively feel resistance to attributing phenomenal
experiences to machines. Other studies however might seem to challenge this claim, showing that
people ordinarily do not make the distinction between experiential and intentional states (Phelan et al
2012) or that people make it in a slightly different way from philosophers, based on valence, not on
qualia (Sytsma & Machery 2010). Interestingly, Sytsma and Machery found that people were willing
to ascribe experiences to simple robots. However their reasons for doing so were based on a
conception of subjective experience that was tied to hedonic value and valence. Thus if Sytsma &
Machery are right people seem to operate with a different conception of subjective experience to
philosophers. (For doubts about this last claim see Buckwalter & Phelan 2013). As a quick aside, I
don’t think studies like these provide any support for the claim that the folk intuitively feel that
computation is sufficient for experience. Thus they do not raise problems for the claim I have just
made about people’s intuitions. Buckwalter and Phelan found for instance that people think
phenomenal experience is necessary for the performance of a function. However, the studies they ran
didn’t tell us whether people think function (let alone computation) is sufficient for experience.
7 Block’s distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness (which I questioned in footnote 4)

might also be interpreted as trading in part on an intuition that cognition is not sufficient for
consciousness (Block 1995, 2007, 2011). Access consciousness is a property representational states
have when they are made available to mechanisms of report, reasoning, evaluation, decision-making
and memory. Phenomenal consciousness is a property of states of mind there is something it is like to
be in. Access consciousness seems to be readily explainable in computational terms – the global
workspace architecture is one popular candidate (Dehaene et al 2006; Baars 1988). Block argues
however that phenomenal and access consciousness dissociate, based in part on the phenomenal
overflow experiments of Lamme. In defending physicalism, he denies that phenomenal consciousness
can be reduced to functional properties of representational states. I reject Block’s distinction between
phenomenal and access consciousness. Such a distinction only appears necessary because of a
computational theory of cognition tailor made for explaining unconscious cognitive processes.

4
this particular case: once cognitive processes are strictly separated from consciousness as
they are by cognitivists, a problem arises of explaining how cognitive processes could form
the basis for consciousness. Far from deflating the hard problem, we seem to find ourselves
face-to-face the very same gap between consciousness and cognition that forms the basis for
the hard problem.

Functionalists have attempted to deal with this gap by arguing that it is conceptual or
epistemological, and not metaphysical. They argue that the concepts we employ to think
about experiences in first-person thought (so-called “phenomenal concepts”) are distinct
from the concepts we use when we think about experiences as functional or physical states.
The distinctness of these concepts forms the basis for an intuition that the relation between
experience and the underlying physical and functional states is contingent. However, the
distinctness of concepts doesn’t imply the metaphysical distinctness of the properties to
which these concepts refer (Loar 1997). Phenomenal concepts and physical/functional
concepts while distinct are nevertheless co-referring: both types of concept refer to states
that are functional and physical in nature. It is hard to see however why this doesn’t simply
amount to pushing back the problem to that of explaining the possession of phenomenal
concepts in functionalist terms. Suppose we agree that the puzzlement surrounding
phenomenal experience arises from the special type of phenomenal concepts we use to think
about experience. Still we would like an explanation of this conceptual capacity in
representational and computational terms. The deflationist programme of the functionalist
will remain promissory so long as we lack such an explanation. However it is such an
explanation that I have suggested is unlikely to be forthcoming so long as we continue to
work with the tools of classical cognitive science.

What if we dispense with the representational and computational framework of classical

cognitive science, as advocates of a radical embodied cognitive science (abbreviated as
RECS) have recently recommended (Silberstein & Chemero 2012; 2015)? I have suggested it
is hard not to think of cognition as occurring independently from consciousness, so long as
we think of cognition as computation. RECS trades in the old computational explanatory
framework of classical cognitive science for a set of new explanatory tools borrowed from
dynamical systems theory and ecological psychology. These explanatory tools form the basis
for different conceptualisations of cognition. We need no longer think of cognitive processes
as being constituted by computational, rule-like operations carried out on inner
representational structures that are the bearers of semantic content. Cognitive processes are
instead conceived of as constituted by temporally extended, skilled and practical
engagements of embodied agents with the environments they inhabit. Might such a
reconceptualization of cognitive processes open up the possibility of a successful deflation of
the hard problem?

My central claim in this paper is that RECS challenges any separation of conscious from non-
conscious cognitive processes. It does so by showing how both conscious and non-conscious

5
cognitive processes mutually constrain each other as dynamical processes evolving over
different time scales. In virtue of the mutual constraints that hold between cognitive and
conscious processes, I argue against the cognitivist separation of unconscious and conscious
cognitive processes. I concentrate on making the case for the latter claim in what follows.
However my reasons for doing so are that once the separation of conscious from
unconscious cognition is rejected, this opens up a promising strategy for the successful
deflation of the hard problem.

My argument unfolds as follows. In section 1 I introduce the embodiment programme in

cognitive science as I understand it. Section 2 introduces two core explanatory concepts that
my argument will need from dynamical systems theory: self-organisation and circular
causality. The main argument unfolds across section 3 and 4. In section 3, I explain why
consciousness should be understood at the level of the agent-environment system as a
whole. I also briefly discuss how the theory I’m developing relates to the sensorimotor or
enactive theory of consciousness which is the theme of this special issue. In section 4, I use
this view of consciousness to argue for the inseparability of consciousness and cognition.
The paper closes by considering the objection that a gap may still remain between embodied
cognition as I’ve characterised it and phenomenality. I briefly outline how a strategy for
responding to this objection opens up once we question the separation of cognition from
consciousness.

1. EMBODIED COGNITION

The core claim of the embodied cognition research programme is that cognitive processes
are functionally continuous with perception and action (Chemero 2009; Anderson 2014).
Evolutionarily more recent human cognitive achievements such as language, mathematics,
and theory of mind redeploy phylogenetically older capacities for perception and action.
Capacities for practically engaging with the environment have become highly developed
over the course of our evolutionary history, and gradually repurposed to serve new ends
that relate to the social and cultural contexts we inhabit. 8 Much of what is distinctive about
human thought that sets us apart from other animals (such as reading and writing and other
cultural practices) can be explained by the complex environments we have built around us.
Human material culture and technology offers a vast array of possibilities for thinking and
acting that are not available to our evolutionary ancestors that do not share our sociocultural
forms of life (Rietveld & Kiverstein 2014).

8Support for this hypothesis comes in part from findings in cognitive neuroscience that demonstrate
how regions of the human brain that once served specialised sensorimotor functions are also
activated in many high-level cognitive tasks (Anderson 2014).

6
The environment an animal perceives is made up of objects that have a value and meaning
immediately and directly detected in perception. Gibson coined the term “affordance” to
refer to the value-laden meaning the environment has for the animals that inhabit it. He
defined “affordances” as what the environment “offers the animal, what is provides or
furnishes for good or ill” (Gibson 1979: 127). Typical examples of affordances are surfaces
that can be walked upon or climbed, objects that can be grasped or thrown, food that is
edible, and so on. It is the affordances of the environment that animals perceive first and
foremost, not qualities such as colour, shape, size and so on. Indeed the very idea of sensory
qualities is the result of ignoring or abstracting away from the practically significant contexts
and situations in which sensory qualities typically occur. 9

Researchers of embodied cognition often use dynamical systems theory to explain cognitive
processes (Chemero 2009). Agent and environment are modelled as coupled dynamical
systems. The agent couples to the landscape of affordances, and on the basis of this coupling
a field of affordances emerges made up of a selection of action possibilities that are relevant
to the agent at the time (Bruineberg & Rietveld 2014). Two systems are said to be
“dynamically coupled” when they exert continuous and mutual causal influence on each
other. Such is the degree of integrated and coordinated mutual influence between the two
systems that we can’t solve the equations describing the behaviour of each system
separately. 10 This integrated and coordinated mutual causal influence is also found in the
agent’s interaction with the landscape of affordances, which is why it is appropriate to
describe this interaction in terms of dynamic coupling.11 The tight coupling between agent
and environment has the consequence that we cannot model the behaviour of the agent-

9
As partial evidence for this claim about the nature of perception, consider the extensive findings that
show how spatial properties such as size and distance are scaled to metrics that derive from the
morphology of the body and its abilities. Dennis Proffitt and colleagues have found that visual
information related to size and distance is modulated and scaled to the body based on the body’s
morphology, physiology and behaviour. In one striking experiment subjects wore goggles that
magnified or shrunk the apparent size of an object (Linkenauger et al 2010). Yet when subjects place
their hand next to the object, the shrinking or magnifying effect disappears and objects appear to have
their normal size. These studies and many others like them show that how size and distance are
perceived is continuously modulated by the subject’s abilities, purposes and concerns. We first of all
perceive the spatial properties of objects relative to our pragmatic concerns. Objective size and
distance are idealisations we may later arrive at by abstracting away from lived experience.
10 van Orden et al (2003); Silberstein & Chemero (2012); Anderson et al (2012).

11 Chemero and his co-authors have pointed to a mathematical measure of what they call “interaction-

dominance”, the type of non-linear ongoing causal influence between coupled systems or
components we have described above (Anderson et al 2012). Following Van Orden et al (2003) they
argue that 1/f scaling also known as “pink noise” is a “signature” of interaction-dominance. For
instance, Dotov et al (2010) found 1/f scaling in an experiment in which subjects played a video game,
controlling an object on a monitor using a mouse. When the mouse connection was temporarily
disturbed however 1/f scaling decreased. Commenting on this experiment, Silberstein and Chemero
write: “This indicates that, during normal operation, the computer mouse is part of the smoothly
functioning interaction-dominant system engaged in the task.” (Silberstein & Chemero 2012: 45)

7
environment system as the product of the interaction of independent structures and
components, some falling on the side of the agent, and some on the side of the environment.

I return to all of these points in more detail below where I explain how the claims I have just
made about embodied cognition also generalise to embodied consciousness. This is because
within RECS cognition and consciousness are conceived of as “inseparable” and
“complementary” aspects of brain-body-environment systems (Silberstein & Chemero 2012:
40). Silberstein and Chemero write that “experience is cognition and cognition is
experiential” (op cit. p.41). I will call this the inseparability thesis.

At first glance the inseparability thesis might seem to imply the denial that cognitive
processes can occur unconsciously. Are Silberstein and Chemero saying that cognition just is
identical with experience? Such a reading would seem to have the strong modal implication
that there is no possible world in which cognitive processes can occur in the absence of
experience. Yet a wide body of research in experimental psychology seems to demonstrate
that perception for instance can occur without conscious awareness. 12 This is but one
example of what many will take to be irrefutable evidence for unconscious cognition. That
being said it should be noted that studies of unconscious cognitive processes take place
under strict experimental laboratory conditions. These experimental conditions are precisely
artificial insofar as they abstract away from the normal ecological contexts in which
unconscious and conscious cognitive processes normally occur.

Perhaps Silberstein and Chemero should be read as claiming that outside of artificial
laboratory conditions there is no separating experience from cognition. This at least is the
claim I defend in what follows. I argue that cognition is experiential because in everyday life
cognitive processes do not unfold independently from conscious processes. Conscious and
unconscious cognition are best described as self-organising processes that unfold over
different but interacting temporal and spatial scales. The faster processes associated with
unconscious cognition are “enslaved” (to use the terminology of complex systems theory) by
processes associated with conscious cognition that unfold slowly over longer periods of
time. At the same time the latter processes are brought about by the interactions among
faster changing processes. Thus conscious and unconscious cognitive processes are
inseparable because they are mutually constraining. In order to clarify and defend these
claims we first need to do some work to understand (1) why the agent-environment system
should be understood as a self-organising system, and (2) in what sense the processes that
make up this system are multi-scaled and mutually constraining. The next section offers an
analysis of some technical terminology that will prove necessary for explaining and
defending these two claims.

12 For discussion see Marcel (1983); Dretske (2006); Brogaard (2011) and Prinz (2015).

8
 2. SELF-ORGANISATION AND CIRCULAR CAUSALITY

Self-organisation is a property of systems that due to their dynamics exhibit coherent global
or collective behaviours when starting from random, initially disordered states. It refers to
the emergence of order from disorder.13 The classical example is the convection patterns or
Bénard rolls that form in viscous liquids such as oil when heated. When a liquid is heated,
the temperature difference between the surface and the bottom of the liquid is initially small
and the liquid is able to dissipate whatever energy is introduced through a process known
as “heat conduction”. However when the temperature of the liquid passes a certain value
and more energy is introduced into the liquid than can be dissipated, the liquid becomes
disordered or globally unstable, and so-called “convection patterns” can be seen to form.
Conduction and convection are coherent global behaviours of the system. They are called
“order parameters” in the language of dynamical systems theory.

The order parameter, as a macroscopic property of the system, stands in an interesting

relation to the microscopic parts or constituents which make up the system. On the one
hand, the order parameter is generated out of the interactions of these lower-level micro-
components. At the same time, however the order parameter “enslaves” the behaviour of
the lower-level micro-components. Dotov gives the following helpful example of this
enslavement process (which he borrows from Hoftstadter 2007):

“Think about driving a car on an open highway. You have several degrees of
freedom: speed, lane, stopping on the side etc. As the traffic gets denser, you start to
be more constrained but still you are the master of your journey within the
constraints. You will arrive at different times depending on how aggressively you
drive. Beyond a certain critical density of cars, however a traffic jam becomes
inevitable. Then all cars start and stop as the traffic jam permits them. You creep
forward in discrete jumps and how fast you accelerate within these brief periods
does not affect the overall speed with which you will traverse the jammed area. You
have lost your degrees of freedom to the traffic pattern. Yet, the traffic pattern is but
the movement of the cars on the road!” (Dotov 2014: 4)

The order parameter in the traffic example is brought about by the quantity of cars on the
road and their individual speed. We can think of the speed of each car as a control
parameter which can over time, induce qualitative changes in the system as a whole. The
macroscopic property of traffic systems is thus dependent upon the control parameter which
relates to the behaviour of each of the vehicles that make up the traffic system and their
interactions. On the other hand, the speed of each vehicle is limited to different degrees by

13Self-organisation can also be observed when systems move from one functional synergetic state to
another, as happens when a horse for instance increases speed from a trot to a gallop. My thanks to
the reviewers for this example. For further discussion of multi-stable coordination dynamics see
Bressler & Kelso 2001.

9
the overall global pattern in the traffic. We see this most graphically when a traffic jam
occurs, and the behaviour of each of the drivers on the road is limited to the extreme.
Tschaker and Haken (2007) describe the relation of the global and local properties of a self-
organising system as one of “circular causality”. The order parameter emerges out of the
dynamic interactions of the local elements that make up the system. At the same time, the
local elements combine to form synergies that constrain the degrees of freedom of each of
the individual elements, thereby influencing the interactions of the elements that make up
the system.

I will argue that the relationship between the brain and the body in its engagement with
affordances is likewise one of circular causality. The brain is constantly taking direction from
the body as it prepares to respond to relevant affordances that matter to the agent at the
time.14 It is this circular causality which I shall claim establishes the inseparability of
conscious and unconscious cognition. I argue for the latter claim in two stages. In section 3, I
explain why I analyse phenomenal consciousness by reference to the animal’s practical
engagement with the field of relevant affordances. In section 4, I show how the agent’s
engagement with the field of affordances constrains the neuronal dynamics that form in the
agent’s brain.

3. CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE CONTEXT OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Phenomenal experience is often described in terms of atomic sensations conceived of as

either primary or secondary qualities. The contents of phenomenal experience come about
from somehow stitching together sensory qualities conceived of as intrinsic properties of
experience. Just as pain is intrinsically unpleasant, so an experience of redness is thought of
as intrinsically red. By contrast, the view of phenomenal experience I will outline in this
section begins from everyday human life. I take phenomenal consciousness to be rooted in
the agent’s practical engagement with a landscape of affordances. What the agent primarily
experiences is an environment rich with opportunities for action, each of which is to varying
degrees attractive or repellent. As Heidegger noted, we never “originally and really perceive
a crowd of sensations – tones and noises, for example; rather we hear the storm whistling in
the chimney, we hear the three-engine aeroplane, we hear the Mercedes in its immediate
contrast with the Volkswagen”. Heidegger continues: “Much closer to us than any

14See van Orden, Hollis & Wallot (2012) on the “blue-collar” brain. They argue the brain is “blue-
collar” because it receives its directions from the body just as blue-collar workers take their orders
from management. Related arguments can also be found in Wallot & van Orden (2012) and Turvey
(2007).

10
sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door slam in the house, and never hear
acoustic sensations, or mere sounds.” 15

The objects that we experience are always related in some way to our concerns as human
beings. An object might be meaningful to a perceiver because of how it can be manipulated,
and put to work in the production of something. Of course we experience many objects that
are of no obvious practical use to us, such as stars shooting across the sky. Whatever we can
experience will however affect us in some way that is a reflection of our human concerns,
and what matters to us as human agents. This is as true of the shooting-star we catch sight of
while star-gazing as it is of the hammer we take hold of when building a piece of furniture.

The phenomenology of everyday life is one of absorbed coping (Dreyfus 1991): our
consciousness is normally fully taken up with the familiar everyday situations in which we
are involved. 16 As embodied subjects we inhabit situations that are familiar to us in the sense
that we know how to act in them. We act on the basis of skill, allowing our actions to be
drawn from us by the opportunities for action that are relevant to us in familiar contexts of
activity. The relevant possibilities for action are experienced as having what the gestalt
psychologist Koffka described as “demand character”:

“I have a need which for the moment cannot be satisfied: then an object appears in
my field which may serve to relieve that tension, and then this object becomes
endowed with a demand character.” (Koffka 1935: 354)

Koffka describes how an apple can say to us “eat me” when we are hungry, and water can
say “drink me” when we are thirsty (op cit, p.7). Thirst and hunger in these examples are
experienced as affective tensions, but more generally the relevant affordances that solicit
action from us are the ones that we experience as relieving an affective tension (Rietveld
2008). 17 Affective tensions arise because the agent as an open, far-from equilibrium system is
in a state of inherent instability in its interactions with the environment, constantly having
needs it must satisfy in order to function well (Kiverstein & Rietveld 2015).18 Affective
tensions have their basis in disequilibria with the environment, which are a source of
concern to the agent. This concern ranges from vital needs (as in the examples from Koffka)
but also extends to projects and interests that are the source of what we care about and value
as agents. Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014) take this spectrum of concerns to be grounded in a

15Heidegger (1977: 156).

16 It should be noted that Dreyfus from whom the terminology of absorbed coping originates,
steadfastly avoids talking about consciousness and experience. He does so because of the Cartesian
connotations of these terms, which he follows Heidegger in seeking to displace.
17 The concept of “solicitation” originates with Dreyfus in his writings on Merleau-Ponty. See e.g.

Dreyfus 2005, 2012, and Dreyfus & Kelly 2007.

18 One of my reviewers suggested that the flip side of this affective tension is the abundance of

energetic resources which the agent experiences as needing to be channelled towards a particular
affordance.

11
basic overarching concern on the part of agents to regulate interactions with the
environment in such a way as to tend towards an optimal grip on a landscape of
affordances. 19 Affective tensions relate more generally to our existential involvement with
the world, and the ways in which we dwell in and inhabit the world. Thus in allowing
ourselves to respond to an invitation from an affordance, we express something about how
the world matters to us as body subjects.

The phenomenal experience an agent has of their environment is for the most part exhausted
by the affordances that are currently relevant, demanding that the agent acts on them. 20 It is
the interrelated relevance of each of the affordances that make up the field that is
experienced phenomenally, and lived through by the agent as an affective tension. An
affordance is experienced as relevant when the agent experiences their relation to it as
deviating from an optimal state which is a function of what the agent cares about. The
affective tension the agent experiences manifests in their body as a pattern of action-
readiness 21 some of which are appetitive, and others of which are aversive or defensive
(Frijda 2010). The states of action readiness the agent manifests are anticipatory; what the
agent anticipates are actions that would move the agent closer towards accomplishing what
matters to them. When an agent responds adequately to a relevant affordance, she correctly
anticipates what she needs to do to accomplish what she cares about as an agent. The result
is a reduction in the affective tension she experiences with the world that moved her to
action in the first place.

19 Bruineberg and Rietveld are drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of maximal grip. The classic
example in Merleau-Ponty is viewing a painting from a certain vantage point. Merleau-Ponty
describes the viewer as tending “toward the maximum of visibility” from which the painting
“vouchsafes most of itself” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2002: 352). Bruineberg and Rietveld talk about a
“tendency towards an optimal grip” because of the inherent instability in the agent-environment
relation. Both the environment and the agent are in a constant state of change. I say more about this
inherent instability below.
20 I make this qualification “for the most part” since an obvious objection to the position I’m

developing is that we undergo phenomenal experiences when we dream or when we hallucinate, yet
there is nothing in the world with which we are affectively involved. Examples like this seem to show
that involvement with relevant affordances cannot be constitutive of phenomenal experience because
it is not necessary for phenomenal experience. Since my purpose here is not to offer a full defence of
the embodied theory of phenomenal experience, I will postpone a full discussion of this point. Suffice
it to say because the brain has the capacity to generate some experience in ways that are relatively
unconstrained by interaction with the world, it doesn’t follow that all experience is brain-bound. See
Noë (2009, ch.8) for further discussion, and Revonsuo (2015) for an important critique of Noë.
21 I borrow the concept of action-readiness from the emotion psychologist Nico Frijda. See e.g. Frijda

1986. The connection of my arguments to the emotion psychology literature will become clearer later.
The argument that perception is constitutively tied to preparedness for action has a long history that
can be traced by to Sperry (1952) and J.G. Taylor (1962). Taylor wrote that “Perception is a state of
multiple simultaneous readiness for actions directed to the objects in the environment that are acting
on the receptor organs at the time.” (Taylor 1965: 1) My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the
reference to Sperry.

12
This all takes skill on the part of the agent. The agent must have acquired extensive
experience in dealing with repeatedly encountered situations, so that the actions the
situation invites from her are ones that are appropriate to the situation. Her ability to
respond adequately and appropriately is the result of extensive training and experience. The
skill she has developed means that when she is invited to act in a particular way by the
environment she responds in ways that take her closer towards attaining what is valuable to
her. So long as she does not act adequately, and she is not sufficiently well-attuned to what
the situation demands of her, an affective tension will persist. She will be moved to adapt
and modify how she acts until she finds a way to reduce the tension she experiences, which
can help her to further improve her skill over time.

When the agent responds adequately to a soliciting affordance, her actions are not forced
upon her, in the way that a reflex or conditioned behaviour might be. The affective tension
she experiences amounts to her appraisal of the situation and what is significant to her.
When she acts so as to reduce this tension, she does so based on an evaluation of the
situation that is part and parcel of her skill. She immediately sizes up the situation and what
she is required to do because of her past experience and training. A classic example is
standing distance: when someone stands too close to us in a conversation, we immediately
feel the need to introduce more distance with the other person. Our discomfort has its basis
in the norms for conversational interactions to which we are accustomed. When we respond
to this discomfort by discretely taking a step back, we are doing so based on an intuitive
normative reaction, an evaluation that the social interaction doesn’t feel quite right.

I’ve said that phenomenal consciousness is typically fully taken up with those aspects of her
local environment that are relevant and matter to the agent. Not all of the affordances that
are relevant at a given moment, matter to the agent to the same degree. Some are of greater
importance than others. As I type these words the bottle of water handily situated on my
desk is also relevant to me, but it is less important to me right now than completing this
sentence. When I get thirsty I may find myself pausing from my writing and reaching for the
bottle. Now drinking has become more important to me than writing. We should think of
experience as having a field like structure in which some of the relevant affordances occupy
the foreground, while others occupy the background.22 The possibilities for action that are of
greatest significance to the subject because they elicit the most affective tension occupy the
foreground of this field. Other affordances that do not matter so much to the agent occupy a
position on the fringe or horizon of the field. When an agent responds to the invitation of
soliciting affordance the result is a change in the structure of the field. Once I have quenched
my thirst, the bottle ceases to be so relevant, and writing once again occupies the foreground
of my concern. The other aspects of the environment that are right now also relevant to me
withdraw into the background.

22 I borrow this terminology from Bruineberg & Rietveld (2014).

13
The structure of the field of (relevant) affordances, and with it the character of my
experience changes from moment to moment based on my affective states which arise in me
as a result of my involvement with the world, and my evaluation of what matters in a given
situation. As I act, so the affective tension I experience most intensely is reduced.
Possibilities for action that were experienced as urgently calling for my attention becomes
somewhat less urgent, and other relevant possibilities for action move from the horizon into
the foreground. The aspects of the environment that occupy the foreground of my
experience, spurring me into action are the result of a complex interplay between the
interests of the agent and the landscape of affordances.

Phenomenal experience is thus best understood and analysed at the level of the whole agent
in interaction with the environment. The field of affordances, which is what we experience,
is the result of an interplay between the landscape of affordances, and the internal affective
states of the agent elicited by their involvement with the world. We should think of the
selective openness and responsiveness to relevant affordances as a description of the
intentional directedness of experience or what we have elsewhere called “skilled
intentionality” (Kiverstein & Rietveld 2015). 23 Phenomenal experience is active, and arises in
the interactions of the agent with the environment. We experience relevant affordances that
move us to act in ways that improve our situation in the world. Relevant affordances elicit
anticipatory patterns of action readiness. In agents that are skilled, what we anticipate are
actions that are adequate and specific to the affordances we are acting on. The skills and
abilities the agent has learned allow them in the here and now to precisely and accurately
anticipate the actions that will improve their grip on the world, taking them closer towards
attaining what matters to them (albeit temporarily) in their involvement with the world.

The sensorimotor theory or enactive theory of phenomenal consciousness shares my

emphasis on activity and skillful interaction with the environment. The central claim of the
sensorimotor theory is that differences in the qualities and modalities of experience are
explained by objective laws that describe regularities in how sensory stimulation arises
when a perceiver interacts with the world. The sensory quality of redness for example is
explained by the regular ways in which illumination changes when we move our eyes
around and otherwise interact with a red-coloured surface. The felt softness of the sponge
consists in the resistance and felt pressure the sponge generates when I squeeze it between
my fingers (Myin 2003). Sensory interaction with the world makes available to the perceiver
systematic patterns of sensorimotor dependence to which the brain is attuned. When we
have a given experience this is because we have cognitive access to the sensorimotor

23 Deflationist theories of phenomenal experience take experience to be exhausted by its

representational and functional properties. My account is in the spirit of deflationary account insofar
as I claim that the phenomenality of experience is explained by the intentional directedness of
experience at the world. A key difference however is that I do not account for intentionality by appeal
to mental representation, but instead in terms of selective openness and responsiveness to relevant
affordances.

14
contingencies (SMCs) to which the brain is currently attuned. This cognitive access allows
the mastery of SMCs to play a role in action planning and report (O’Regan 2011).

The sensorimotor theory operates with a maximally broad understanding of sensorimotor

contingencies as patterns of dependency that arise because of the details of the agent’s
sensory and motor systems and its surroundings (Buhrmann et al 2013). Sensorimotor
contingencies are the most general and abstract lawful relations of dependence that hold
between all possible sensory and motor states of an agent with a particular sensory and
motor apparatus embedded in a particular environmental setting. The question of why the
agent is moving and of the agent’s interests and purposes are ignored.

I’ve been arguing that phenomenal experience is typically exhausted by the field of
affordances. It follows that the sensorimotor contingencies that play a role in fixing the
quality of experience will be restricted to those that pertain to relevant affordances the agent
is ready to act on. In order to act adequately on soliciting affordances the agent must be able
to precisely and accurately anticipate the sensory feedback that will arise from action. The
skills of the agent for dealing adequately with affordances depend on the brain being able to
accurately anticipate the patterns of sensorimotor contingency that occur as the agent
responds to a soliciting affordance.24

Michael Anderson has argued for a similar position. He writes:

“…organisms are primarily sensitive to, and act so as to select and maintain desired
values of, salient organism-environment relationships…In this framework the
problem of action selection is better understood as achieving the right perception(s)
given a goal than it is of choosing the right response to a given situation.” (Anderson
2014: 184)

What Anderson refers to as “salient organism-environment relationships” I’ve been calling

relevant affordances. Action selection as I’ve characterised it is a matter of anticipating the
right patterns of sensorimotor contingency that reduce the affective tension elicited by a
relevant affordance. Anticipation of this type is only possible because of the acquisition of
skills and the accumulation of experience over time. It is on the basis of a past history of
sensory feedback and learning that the agent is able here and now to correctly anticipate
which ways of interacting with the world will lead to a good outcome. I’m suggesting we

24None of these claims are per se in conflict with the letter of the sensorimotor theory. We’ve seen
above how the sensorimotor theory claims that the qualities of experiences are determined by the
subset of sensorimotor contingencies to which the agent has cognitive access. If my arguments are
along the right lines, it follows that the sensorimotor contingencies that determine the qualities of
experience will always relate to the affordances that are affecting the agent, making the agent ready to
deal with them.

15
think of this past learning as learning to select the response that will in Anderson’s words
achieve the right perceptions given the agent’s interests at the time.

My aim in this section has been to demonstrate how self-organisation is crucial for
understanding phenomenal experience. Phenomenal experience I’ve argued should be
understood in terms of the agent’s skilled practical engagement with a field of affordances.
The possibilities for action the agent experiences (i.e. the affordances evaluated as relevant)
depends not only on the external environment, but also on the skills of the agent and its
concern to move closer towards being in an optimal state in its relation to the world. The
states of the agent and the environment change continuously in response to each other, and
phenomenal experience I’ve been arguing is emergent from this dynamical, self-organising
process. The final stage in my argument will be to show how consciousness and cognition
stand in a circular causal relation to each other. I will use this circular causality to make an
argument for what I’ve called above the inseparability thesis – the thesis that consciousness
and unconscious cognition are interdependent and so inseparable.

4. THE INSEPARABILITY OF COGNITION, EMOTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

In the previous section I’ve argued that phenomenal experiences and affective evaluations or
appraisals of the environment are intertwined. Phenomenal experience is (normally)
exhausted by the affordances we experience as relevant. The latter are a function of states of
action readiness that arise in the agent on the basis of their relation to the world. In this
section I focus on the dynamical processes that lead to an affective evaluation. We attend to
whatever is affectively significant to us, and I will assume in what follows (somewhat
controversially I admit) that attention is necessary for consciousness. 25 I make this
assumption because it is attentional processes that select the affordances that are salient (i.e.
relevant) to the agent. We’ve seen in section 1 above how inflationists make a distinction
between phenomenal and access consciousness by arguing that phenomenal experiences can
occur in the absence of attention (see e.g. Block 2011). I’m however siding with so-called
“deflationalists” in arguing against such a distinction. My aim in this section is to provide
the final piece of the argument for a deflationist response to the hard problem.

Affect I’ve suggested always arises together with bodily states of action readiness.
Psychologists often distinguish between the feeling component of an emotional episode; the
motivational component, and the cognitive or appraisal component. While we can perhaps
make such distinctions in psychology, the functional organisation of the brain is much
messier and supports a view in which these three components operate in tandem and are
tightly synchronised, reciprocally influencing each other (Lewis 2005; Pessoa 2013). The

25Prinz (2012) argues for the stronger claim that attention is both necessary and sufficient for
phenomenal consciousness. I hope to return to Prinz’s arguments on another occasion.

16
agent’s evaluation of the world, their readiness to act, and the feelings of tension they
experience are all entangled strands of a single process. These multiple components
dynamically interact to form what Lewis (2005) has describes as a stable and coherent
“global cognitive-emotional amalgam” or “emotional interpretation”. 26

This self-organising process which leads to the formation of an emotional interpretation

begins with some unanticipated change in the environment or in the states of the agent.
Something happens either in the environment or on the side of the agent that is not correctly
anticipated. We’ve seen in the previous section how we spend much of our lives dealing
with familiar situations in which we are able to act without thought on the basis of habits
and skills. One of the many other affordances that we are simultaneously ready to act upon
in the field of affordances can suffice to shift us from one pattern of activity to another. A
call on my mobile phone for instance can induce me to stop writing to answer it. Our skillful
dealings with the field of affordances are inherently unstable. This is because the self-
organising processes that form the basis for skilled intentionality exhibit what complex-
systems theorists describe as “metastability” (Kelso 1995; Bressler & Kelso 2001; Bruinberg &
Rietveld 2014). They are both robust to perturbations allowing the agent to maintain focus
on what she is doing but also flexible enough to allow the agent to switch what she is doing
when it is important for her to do so. At the same time as the agent is occupied with a given
affordance, she is also ready to respond to the invitations of multiple other affordances. The
agent's metastable poise ensures that specific minor perturbations (deviations from
anticipations) can alter the slowly-evolving dynamics, inducing a temporary increase in
disequilibria to which the agent can adapt by altering what she is currently doing. The states
of action readiness that arise anticipate the changes in sensory states the agent needs to bring
about in order to reduce the temporary increase in disequilibrium in the brain-body-
environment system.
This temporary increase in disequilibria shows up in the brain as a loss of orderliness (Lewis
2005). The unexpected event induces a bifurcation or phase transition leading the brain to
shift from global and coherent pattern of activation into a temporarily disordered state
(Varela 1999). Orderliness is restored through what Lewis describes as “positive feedback”
in which new patterns of activation grow and spread through the brain, recruiting diverse
cognitive and emotional systems along the way. This process begins in the brainstem often
in interaction with the amygdala. These systems regulate primitive orienting responses and
action tendencies tuning the perception and actions systems in the cortex to the unexpected
event (Panksepp 1998). Affect at this stage in neural processing is pre-attentive, initiating the
focusing of attention through the recruitment of cortical systems. The amygdala for instance
responds rapidly to the valence (positive or negative value) of a perceptual stimulus.

26 Lewis’s terminology of “appraisal” and “emotional interpretation” might seem to invite a folk
psychological reading in terms of judgement and belief. Such an interpretation is harmless enough so
long as we don’t take it to imply anything about the subpersonal psychological and neural processes.
The use of these terms should not be understood as committing Lewis to the existence of internal
representational states onto which these folk psychological states neatly map. On the contrary Lewis
will argue that neurodynamics is too messy to allow for such a neat mapping of folk psychological
states.

17
Through its interactions with the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the nucleus accumbens (NAS)
and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the amygdala ensures that attentional processes are
directed to affectively significant stimuli.27

An emotional interpretation begins to stabilise in the brain based on cycles of what Lewis
(2005) calls negative feedback. Negative feedback loops occur when elements interact
reciprocally so that for instance the excitatory effects of one element are met with
compensatory inhibitory responses from other elements. This results in the interacting
elements attaining a steady equilibrium, and the stabilisation or consolidation of global
orderliness. Negative feedback between cortical, limbic and striatal structures for instance
relies on the transmission of glutamate between cell bodies that exerts an excitatory effect,
and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) that exerts an inhibitory effect. Dopamine has been
associated with the suppression of neuronal firing in the cortex, selectively enhancing and
inhibiting the firing rates of prefrontal neurons (Williams & Goldman-Rakic 1995), while
norepinephrine is associated with arousal and excitation (Mather et al 2015).
Neurotransmitter release is initiated by projections from the amygdala, anterior cingulate
cortex, orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, all areas that we have seen above play a
central role in the formation of an emotional interpretation. Neurotransmitters propagate
through multiple systems in the brain contributing to the production of negative feedback
loops and thus to the stabilisation of an emotional interpretation.

Negative feedback loops result in large-scale patterns of temporal synchrony forming in the
brain across “brainstem, hypothalamic, limbic and paralimbic systems” (Lewis & Todd 2005:
218). Phase synchronisation is a property found when populations (or distributed
aggregates) of neurons oscillate together in time at the same frequency (Engel et al 2001; Le
Van Quyen 2003). It provides “a flexible and reversible way to bind together distributed
neurons that may be primarily involved in very different functional processes.” (Cosmelli &
Thompson 2007: 735) Prinz (2012) compares synchrony to a group of people in a noisy
crowd that say the same thing at the same time (p.139). When neurons fire at the same
frequency their joint signal rises above the noise in the rest of the brain thereby facilitating
communication between distantly connected populations of neurons.

This large scale synchronous activity is the basis for a coherent emotional interpretation
which Lewis and Todd (following Freeman 2000) characterise as an agent’s “intention to do

27 For more detailed analysis consult Pessoa (2013, ch.2). For discussion of the role of the OFC in
orienting attention and its interaction with the amygdala see Barrett and Barr (2009). Although I’m
talking about individual brain regions as having specific functions this should not be read as
implying that these regions have fixed functions that map neatly onto folk psychological categories.
On the contrary we should think of individual brain regions as forming elements of transiently
assembled local neural subsystems (TALoNS) as Anderson (2014) argues at length. The precise
functional contribution of a given brain region changes over time as a function of the coalitions and
interactions it enters into with other regions. This view of the relation between neural structure and
function is very much in keeping with Lewis.

18
something about its state in the world.” (p.224) Phase synchronisation brings about
integration of perception, motivationally-relevant associations, with evaluation and
monitoring systems. The result of this integration is “an ongoing state of engagement with
the world, whereby everything we see and hear with an emotional significance engages an
urge to act.” (Lewis 2005: 184) I suggest we think of this emotional interpretation as a
pattern of action-readiness that corresponds to a relevant affordance, the source of a
temporary increase in disequilibria. On the basis of an emotional interpretation, attention is
drawn to those affordances the agent needs to act on if he is reduce the disequilibria in an
agent-environment system and so move closer towards an optimal state.

Lewis and Todd distinguish between three types of emotional interpretation or patterns of
action-readiness. The first relates to goals or intentions (to use their terminology) that can be
satisfied more or less automatically.28 The patterns of action readiness take the form of
automatized sequences of actions like swatting at an annoying mosquito. However most of
an agent’s intentional actions are a good deal more flexible than automatized routines, and
must be adapted to the particularities of the situation in which the agent is acting. These
more flexible, less automatized forms of action call for a second type of emotional
interpretation that occurs when a situation motivates us to switch what we are doing from
one type of activity to another. This type of switch will normally be something the agent can
bring about without needing to explicitly deliberate and reflect on what to do next. Unlike
automatized behaviour it is nevertheless accompanied by a pre-reflective background
awareness that occurs at the level of the whole body ready to deal with familiar situations. I
suggest we think of this pre-reflective awareness as the affective tension that arises as a
result of the increase in disequilibrium in the brain-body-environment system. 29 Finally
Lewis and Todd describe a third type of emotional interpretation that calls for more
reflective and deliberative type of awareness in which the agent focuses on some persisting
obstruction to which he is unable to skilfully adapt. The differences in these three types of
emotional interpretations are tracked by differences in the stability and coherence of the
patterns of phase synchronisation that form between multiple sub-systems in the brain.
Lewis and Todd argue that the longer-lasting the intention of the agent, the more stable the

28 Again we should be careful in how we interpret the concepts of “goal” and “intention”. It would be
a mistake to read these concepts as implying that the agent represents some end or outcome which
she aims at in action. Of course these concepts admit of such a reading but I take Lewis (and Todd) to
be neutral on debates about whether the brain literally embodies mental representations of actions.
29 The connection between affective systems located in the reticular activating system in the brainstem

that monitor changes in the sympathetic and para-sympathetic systems in the body, and a bodily
dimension of the self has been argued for extensively in the work of Damasio (1999) and Panksepp
(1998). In addition Craig (2002) has assembled compelling evidence relating activity in the anterior
insula to bodily self-consciousness. The insula is also referenced by Lewis and Todd (2005) as playing
a key role in supporting “background” or “pre-reflective awareness” involved in this second type of
emotional interpretation. I’m suggesting here that an adequate conceptualisation of the connection
between affective processes and the bodily self should situate affective processes in the context of
familiar situations which the bodily self has habits and skills for coping with.

19
phase synchronisation is among brainstem, limbic, striatal and cortical systems (Lewis &
Todd 2005: 224).

Interestingly, phenomenal consciousness has also been linked to large-scale synchrony in

research concerned with the neural correlates of consciousness. Binocular rivalry has proven
a popular paradigm for studying the changes in brain activity that are correlated with the
shifts in experience subjects report when they switch from experience one image to
another. 30 For instance, Cosmelli et al (2004) presented a series of expanding black and white
checkerboard rings to one of the eyes of their subjects, while the other eye was presented
with a face. They found that as subjects switched from seeing one image to the other,
synchrony was restricted to just a few cortical sites but as the dominant image stabilised in
experience so the wave of synchrony spread both within occipital visual areas, and frontal
areas including anterior cingulate. When the subjects were seeing the checkerboard rings,
their neural responses oscillated with the same frequency (at a rate of five times per second)
as the checkerboard rings. As suppression of the dominant image began, so this long-range
pattern of synchrony was found to dissipate and a process of active desynchronization was
observed. With the transition to a new dominant image, so a new wave of synchrony also
began to build up again. Correspondences were thus found between shifts in experience and
shifting waves of large-scale synchrony in the brain. The waves of synchrony that have been
found to correlate with rivalrous experience occur across multiple wave bands. Thus
Doesburg et al (2009) found a switch in experience corresponded to fast synchronous
oscillations in the gamma band (38-42hz). However these fast oscillations were also
connected to and nested within slower oscillations in the theta-range (5-7hz). These slower
rhythms are hypothesised to divide up consciousness into discrete moments of experience
and the faster rhythms to determine whether experience of an image remains constant or
shifts.

We’ve seen above how emotional interpretation seems also to have its neural basis in highly-
ordered large-scale synchrony extending across multiple sites in the brain. In line with
Doesburg and colleagues finding, Lewis hypothesises that large-scale synchrony forms
within the theta band and carries within it waves of faster-changing gamma oscillations. He
tells us that “theta has been proposed as the fundamental rhythm of corticolimbic self-
organisation (Miller 1991). Thus self-organising emotion-appraisal states could potentially

30In binocular rivalry distinct images are presented to each of the subject’s eyes. Although the stimuli
remain constant, conscious visual perception alternates between the images every few seconds.
Neuroscientists investigate the neural processes that correlate directly when a particular image is
dominant in experience. The studies I review next are discussed more extensively in Thompson (2015:
28-34).

20
be realised by the global-synchronising properties attributed to theta-band oscillations.”
(Lewis 2005: 185). 31

Given this connection between patterns of theta synchrony and consciousness, we now have
additional empirical grounds for linking appraisal of relevant affordances to phenomenal
experience. Emotional interpretations don’t form in the brain through the processing of
sensory inputs in a hierarchical and feedforward manner. We’ve seen rather how they are
self-generated out of the brain’s endogenous self-organising activity. This begins with
activity in the brainstem and the hypothalamus that is triggered by something unanticipated
in the environment that stands in the way of the agent achieving what matters to them.
Patterns of phase synchrony arise spontaneously across many different and spatially remote
neural sites and structures through negative feedback loops that are established in part
through the diffusion of neurotransmitters. Once established, phase synchrony then
modulates activity in the individual sites through a process of entrainment. This happens
through the communication of information between otherwise spatially discrete sites that
allows for these structures to each make a coherent contribution to preparing the agent to
act. We can naturally explain this in terms of circular causality.32 The integrated activity that
unites systems from the highest to the lowest levels of organisation in the brain holds
together because of the circular causal interactions that entrain the activity in the individual
systems to a global pattern.

This nesting of smaller-faster scales within the larger-slower scales delivers an argument for
what I have called the inseparability thesis. I’ve been arguing that emotional interpretations
may have their neural basis in theta-synchronies that enfold faster-changing patterns of
gamma synchrony. Lewis maps this combination of stability (in the form of theta-
synchrony) and change (in the form of waves of gamma synchrony) onto interacting
dynamic networks of brain regions. He describes three such networks that perform
functions associated with evaluation, monitoring and action selection (Lewis 2005: §5.1). The
three networks enter into large-scale feedback loops with each other that form the basis for
patterns of large-scale synchrony. The large-scale loop may exhibit stability and coherence
over an extended interval of time spanning seconds and minutes. However it will also
include smaller loops showing both positive and negative feedback that are less stable and
change over faster time scales. The slower larger-scale processes that stabilise in the brain do
so in ways that are informed by an agent’s history of skilled interactions with the world.
We’ve seen how the emotional interpretations that form in the brain and that direct attention

31 Neuromodulators may also play a critical role in the establishment of temporal synchrony. In a
recent target article Mather and colleagues have shown for instance how the production of
norepinephrine (NE) regulated by the locus coeruleus situated in the brainstem “sculpts and biases”
patterns of gamma synchrony. This serves to further processing that the brain is treating as affectively
significant, while simultaneously suppressing and dampening less important processing that is not
the recipient of NE (Mather et al 2015).
32 Lewis and Todd (2005: 223) also make appeal to the concept of circular causality.

21
to relevant affordances always unfold in an agent that has already acquired habits and skills
for dealing with the world many of which come from sociocultural practices.

All of the neural processes I have been describing in this section thus relate to an agent that
is monitoring and controlling its interactions with the world so as to be continuously
improving its relation to the world. The integration of emotion and appraisal that Lewis
describes takes place in the context of this larger agent-environment system. The emotional
interpretations that change from moment to moment take the form of states of expectancy
and preparation that because of the agent’s skills precisely anticipate the sensory input that
will arise when the agent interacts with the world. The relevance and meaning that is thus
assigned to the world reflects the agent’s history and what she has come to expect as she
prepares to act based on her past history. The dynamics that evolve within the brain over
slow time-scales are themselves situated within a larger system whose dynamics unfolds
over much longer time-scales of development and sociocultural time (i.e. history).

Embodied cognition and consciousness are inseparable then because of this nesting of faster-
smaller scales in the brain within slower-larger scale of global patterns of activity all the way
up to the level of the agent-environment system as a whole. “Cognition is experiential and
experience is cognitive” to return to Silberstein and Chemero’s words because of this multi-
scale nesting of dynamical processes that forms the basis for consciousness. I will finish up
by offer some all too brief thoughts on the implications of all this for the long-standing
philosophical puzzlement about how consciousness can find a place in the natural world.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A DEFLATION OF THE HARD PROBLEM

Suppose consciousness and cognition are inseparable in the way I’ve argue above. Do we
not still face the hard question of how matter gives rise to consciousness? Why in a world
made entirely of physical matter is there something rather than nothing it is like to
experience the world? Suppose consciousness is bound up with slower self-organising
processes associated with human activity. Surely we can ask now: what is it about the
larger/slower processes associated with human activity that endows them with
phenomenology? 33

“Is it just a brute fact about the world that if one side of the equation there is brain,
body and world interacting in the right way that consciousness pops into existence
on the other side of the equation?” (Silberstein & Chemero 2015: 183)

33Dale et al 2012 raise a related question in a chapter that agrees with the central claim of this paper
that phenomenal consciousness needs to be conceptualised as a multi-scale dynamical processes.

22
My strategy for dealing with this question has been broadly deflationist. Like functionalists I
have been arguing against views of consciousness that would insert a gap between
consciousness and cognitive processes. Consider in this light thought experiments that
would have us imagine philosophical zombies. Such thought experiments ask us to conceive
of creatures that are functionally and hence identical to us in terms of their cognitive
processes. Yet despite being identical to us with respect to their cognitive processes, these
creatures are by hypothesis altogether lacking in phenomenal consciousness. There is
nothing it is like for a creature to be a philosophical zombie.

Should we really concede the conceivability of such creatures? Given the arguments I’ve
been making about the inseparability of unconscious cognition and consciousness I suggest
we ought to be reluctant to make such a concession. While we think we can conceive of
philosophical zombies, perhaps we are mistaken. We only think we can conceive of such
creatures because we are operating with a faulty understanding of cognition. Somewhat
ironically it turns out this faulty understanding of cognition may derive from classical
cognitive science. It might be cognitivism with its conception of cognitive processes as
cleanly separated from consciousness that leads inexorably to the hard problem. 34 Once we
dispense with cognitivism, this pulls the rug from under the feet of those philosophers that
would have us imagine zombies in seeking to persuade us of the existence of a hard
problem.

Still one might insist that a puzzle remains as to how to find a place for subjective experience
in a scientific conception of the natural world. For suppose that reality is fundamentally and
essentially physical, and that everything that happens in this reality can be explained by the
laws of physics as they apply to physical reality and its constituents. How is it that subjects
of experience exist in a reality made up of only those elements we find in described in the
physical sciences?

Why should one agree however that the natural world contains only whatever is described
in the physical sciences? Once we recognise that cognitive processes are always ecologically
situated and embodied, this ought to help us to appreciate that reality as we find it
described in the textbooks of physics is at best an abstract mathematical idealisation of the
everyday world in which people ordinarily live their lives. The hard problem has its basis in
a metaphysical interpretation of reality from which phenomenal experience has always
already been excised.

34Perhaps it will be argued however that cognitivists could retain their conception of cognition as
computation while happily agreeing with me about the truth of the inseparability thesis. Whether this
response is available turns on the compatibility of cognitivism with the framework of embodied
cognitive science discussed in section 2, something I do not have the space to consider here. Suffice it
so say I have my doubts about cognitivism which is why I have taken sides with RECS above.

23
In my view this is a thoroughly mistaken metaphysics but I can’t lay claim to having argued
for such an ambitious thesis here. My aims have been more modest. I’ve argued that once
cognition is separated from consciousness it is hard to see how cognition can be what
explains consciousness. Similarly once phenomenal experience is removed from the natural
world as it is in the standard setting-up of the hard problem, it can strike us extremely
puzzling how to reintroduce phenomenal experience into such a conception of the natural
world. Perhaps however the puzzlement arises only because we are starting from a faulty
metaphysics in which experience was excluded from the natural world in the first place. I’ve
been arguing against such a starting point by challenging a cognitivist conception of
cognitive processes that effects such a removal of experience from the natural world through
a separation of cognition from experience. If conscious and unconscious cognition are
dynamically entangled processes as I’ve been arguing, it ought to be less puzzling how there
came to be phenomenal experience in the first place. At least this should be no more
puzzling than the question of how there came to be cognition in the first place, and this is
supposed to be an easy problem. It is in this sense that I take the arguments of this paper to
open the door to a deflation of the hard problem. There is no hard problem as it is
standardly conceived, but only the so-called “easy problems”. 35

References
Anderson, M. 2014. After Phrenology. Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Anderson, M.L., Richardson, M.J., & Chemero 2012. Eroding the boundaries of
cognition: implications of embodiment. Topics in Cognitive Science 4(4): 717-30.
Baars, B. 1988. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Bargh, J.A. & Ferguson, M.J. 2000. Beyond behaviourism: on the automaticity of
higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin 126 (6): 925-45.
Barrett, L.F. & Bar, M. 2009. See it with feeling: affective predictions during object
perception. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (1521): 1325-34.
Block, N. 2011. Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access. Trends in
Cognitive Science 15 (12): 567-75.
Block, N. 2007. Consciousness, accessibility and the mesh between psychology and
neuroscience. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 30 (5): 481-548.

35 I wish to thank David Silverman and Kevin O’Regan for inviting me to contribute to this special
issue and for their continued patience as I repeatedly missed deadlines. David inspired the direction
of this paper after a long summer’s evening in Helsinki spent discussing the hard problem. Thanks
are also due to Michael Kirchhoff, Jelle Bruineberg and Erik Rietveld for earlier formative discussions.
Finally I owe special thanks to a thoughtful set of comments from an anonymous reviewer, turned
around at great speed due to my lateness.

24
 Block, N. 2003. Philosophical issues about consciousness. L. Nadel (Ed.) Encyclopedia of
Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Company.
Block, N. 1995. On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioural and Brain
Sciences 18 (2): 227-247.
Block, N. 1978. Troubles with functionalism. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
Science 9: 261-325.
Bressler, S.L. & Kelso, J.A.S. 2001. Cortical coordination dynamics and cognition. Trends
in Cognitive Science 5: 26-36.
Brogard, B. 2011. Are there unconscious perceptual processes? Consciousness and
Cognition 20 (2): 449-63.
Bruineberg, J. & Rietveld, E. 2014. Self-organization, free-energy minimisation, and
optimal grip on a field of affordances. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience pp.1-14.
Buckwalter, W. & Phelan, M. 2013. Function and feeling machines: a defense of the
philosophical conception of subjective experience. Philosophical Studies 166: 349-61.
Buhrmann, T. Di Paolo, E.A., & Barandiaran, X. 2013. A dynamical systems account of
sensorimotor contingencies. Frontiers in Psychology
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00285
Carruthers, P. 2000. Phenomenal Consciousness. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press)
Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. (Oxford, Oxford
University Press).
Chemero, A. 2009. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).
Cohen, M.A. & Dennett, D.C. 2011. Consciousness cannot be separated from function.
Trends in Cognitive Science 15 (8): 358-364.
Cosmelli, D., Lachaux, J-P., & Thompson, E. 2007. Neurodynamics of consciousness. In
P.D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (Ed’s) The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cosmelli, D., David, O., Lachaux, J-P., Martinerie, J., Garnero, L., & Renault, B. 2004.
Waves of consciousness: ongoing cortical patterns during binocular rivalry. Neuroimage 23
(1): 128-40.
Craig, A.D. 2002. How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological
condition of the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3: 655-666.
Dale, R., Tollefsen, D.P., & Kello, C.T. 2012. An integrative pluralistic approach to
phenomenal consciousness. In S. Edelman, T. Fekete and N. Zach (Ed’s) Being in Time:
Dynamical Models of Phenomenal Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Damasio, A.R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Dehaene, S. 2006. Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable
taxonomy. Trends in Cognitive Science 10 ( ): 204-211.

25
 Dennett, D.C. 2001. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness.
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
Dennett, D.C. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin Books.
Dretske, F. 2006. Perception without awareness. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds)
Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.147-180.
Dretske, F. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
Dreyfus, H.L. 2012. Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require
making it more Heideggerian. Philosophical Psychology 20 (2): 247-68.
Dreyfus, H.L & Kelly, S.D 2007. Heterophenomenology: Heavy-handed sleight of
hand. Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 6: 45-55.
Dreyfus, H.L. 2005. Merleau-Ponty and recent cognitive science. In T. Carman &
M.B.N. Hansen (Ed’s) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Dreyfus, H.L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,
Division 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Doesburg, S.M., Green, J.J., McDonald, J.J., & Ward, L.M. 2009. Rhythms of
consciousness: binocular rivalry reveals large-scale oscillatory network dynamics
mediating visual perception. PLoS-one 4 (7) e6142
Dotov, D. 2014. Putting the reins on the brain. How the body and environment use it.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience pp.1-11.

Dotov, D.G., Nie, L., & Chemero, T. 2010. A demonstration of the transition from
ready-to-hand to unready-to-hand. PLOS-one March 9, 2010
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0009433

Engel, A.K., Fries, P. & Singer, W. 2001. Dynamic predictions: oscillations and
synchrony in top-down processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2: 704-16.
Fahrenfort, J.J. & Lamme, V.A.F. 2012. A true science of consciousness explains
phenomenology: comment on Dennett and Cohen. Trends in Cognitive Science 16 (3): 138-
9.
Fodor, J. 1968. Psychological Explanation: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology.
New York: Random House.
Freeman, W.J. 2000. Emotion is essential to all intentional behaviour. In M.D. Lewis &
I. Granic (Ed’s) Emotion, Development and Self-Organisation: Dynamic Systems Approaches to
Emotional Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Frijda, N. 2010. Impulsive action and motivation. Biological Psychology 84 (3): 570-9.
Frijda, N. 1986. The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garland, A. 2015. Ex Machina. A24 films, Universal Pictures.
Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence
Erlbaum).

26
 Heidegger, M. 1977. The Origin of the Work of Art. Translated by D.F. Krell, in Martin
Heidegger: Basic Writings. (New York, NY, Harper & Row)
Hofdstadter, D.R. 2007. I am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books.
Kelso, J.A.S. 1995. Dynamic Patterns: the Self-Organisation of Brain and Behaviour.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kiverstein, J. & Rietveld, E. 2015. The primacy of skilled intentionality. Philosophia 43 (3):
701-21.
Knobe, J. & Prinz, J. 2008. Intuitions about consciousness: Experimental studies.
Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 7: 67-83.
Koffka, K. 1935. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. London: Lund Humphries.
Lamme, V. 2010. How neuroscience will change our view on consciousness. Cognitive
Neuroscience 1 (3): 204-220.
Le Van Quyen, M. 2003. Disentangling the dynamical core: a research program for a
neurodynamics at the large-scale. Biological Research 36 (1): 67-88.
Lewis, M.D. 2005. Linking emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems
modelling. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 28: 105-31.
Lewis, M.D. & Todd, R.M. 2005. Getting emotional: a neural perspective on emotion,
intention and consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (8-10): 210-35.
Linkenhauger, S.A., V.C. Ramenzoni and D.R. Proffitt 2010. ‘Illusory Shrinkage and
Growth: Body-based Scaling Affects the Perception of Size’, Psychological Science, vol. 21 (9):
1318-25.
Loar, B. 1997. Phenomenal states II. In N. Block, O. Flanagan, G. Guzeldere (Ed’s) The
Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lycan, W. 1996. Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Marcel, A.J. 1983. Conscious and unconscious perception: experiments in visual masking
and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology 15: 197-237.
Mather, M., Clewett, D., Sakaki, M., & Harley, C.W. 2015. Norepinephrine ignites local
hot spots of neuronal excitation: how arousal amplifies selectivity in perception and
memory. Forthcoming target article in Behavioural and Brain Sciences.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945/2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith,
London: Routledge
Miller, R. 1991. Cortico-hippocampal interplay and the representation of contexts in the brain.
Berlin: Springer-Verlag
Myin, E. 2003. An account of colour without a subject? Behavioural and Brain Sciences 26:
42-3.
Noë, A. 2009. Out of our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the
Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill & Wang.

27
 O’Regan, J.K. 2011. Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell. Understanding the Feel of
Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panksepp, J. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: the Foundations of Human and Animal
Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Papineau, D. 2002. Thinking about Consciousness. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press)
Pessoa, L. 2013. The Cognitive-Emotional Brain: From Interactions to Integration.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Phelan, M, Arico, A. & Nichols, S. 2012. Thinking things and feeling things: On an
alleged discontinuity in folk metaphysics of mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences 12 (4): 703-25.
Prinz, J. 2015. Unconscious perception. In M. Matthen (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of
Philosophy of Perception. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp.371-392.
Prinz, J. 2012. The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience. (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press).
Ramsey, W.M. 2007. Representation Reconsidered. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Revonsuo, A. 2015. Hard to see the problem? Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (3-4):
52-67.
Rietveld, E. & Kiverstein, J. 2014. The rich landscape of affordances. Ecological
Psychology 26 (4): 325-52.
Rietveld, E. 2008. Situated normativity: The normative aspect of embodied cognition
in action. Mind 117 (468): 973-1001.
Robbins, P. & Jack, A. 2006. The phenomenal stance. Philosophical Studies 127 (1): 59-
85.

Silberstein, M. & Chemero, T. 2015. Extending neutral monism to the hard

problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22 (3-4): 181-194.

Silberstein, M. and A. Chemero 2012. ‘Complexity and Extended Phenomenological-

cognitive Systems’, Topics in Cognitive Science, vol. 4 (1): 1-16.
Sperry, R.W. 1952. Neurology and the mind-brain problem. American Scientist 40(2):
291-312
Sytsma, J. & Machery, E. 2010. Two conceptions of experience. Philosophical Studies
151 (2): 299-327.
Taylor, J.G. 1965. The behavioural basis of perceived size and distance. Canadian
Journal of Psychology 19 (1): 1-14.
Taylor, J.G. 1962. The Behavioural Basis of Perception. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.

28
 Thompson, E. 2015. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience,
Meditation and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tschaker, W. & Haken, H. 2007. Intentionality in non-equilibrium systems? The
functional aspects of self-organised pattern formation. New Ideas in Psychology 25: 1-15.
Turvey, M.T. 2007. Action and perception at the level of synergies. Human Movement
Sciences 26: 657-97.
Tye, M. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness: a Representational Theory of the Phenomenal
Mind. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
Van Orden, G.C., Hollis, G., & Wallot, S. 2012. The blue-collar brain. Frontiers in
Physiology: Fractal Physiology http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2012.00207
Van Orden, G.C., Holden, J.G., & Turvey, M.T. 2003. Self-organisation of cognitive
performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132 (3): 331-350.
Varela, F. 1999. The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time consciousness. In J.
Petitot, F.J. Varela, B. Pachoud, & J.M. Roy (Ed’s) Naturalising Phenomenology: Issues in
Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
pp.266-329.
Wallot, S. & van Orden, G. 2012. Ultra-fast cognition. Journal of Consciousness Studies 19
(5-6): 141-60.
Williams, G.V. & Goldman-Rakic, P.S. 1995. Modulation of memory fields by dopamine
D1 receptors in prefrontal cortex. Nature 376 (6541): 572-5.

29